Stenson paints wonderful but conflicting pictures, by times funny,
sad, ironic, and painful. ... Stenson takes us on a timeless journey
with this cleverly crafted coming-of-age story that has us laughing
at Lock's wit and understanding his woes.
—Legacy
Meet Tyrone Lock: born of farmers’ stock;
overeducated, underemployed. An inveterate pick-nose and clandestine
squeezer of Revels in the supermarket. Disaffected in a way that
Adrian Mole would recognize (though as Tyrone takes pains to point
out, he’s hardly a tortured artist; his BA was in Economics).
Inexplicably involved with the lovely, pampered Miss Athena Till.
The young couple are preparing for their first
trip abroad: the obligatory horizon-widening sojourn in Europe,
the Land of the Forefathers and the Wellspring of Culture.
Except that this is an excursion that Tyrone would
do anything to get out of. His horizons are plenty broad, thank
you very much, and he’d rather spend his days taking walks
with his dog, fly-fishing without a hook, and composing such melodious
odes to his native land as:
O Beaver Creek,
In the Foothills of Alberta's Rocky Mountains,
I would sooner have you,
Than a bunch of crappy marble fountains.
First published in 1974 by Macmillan and now released
for the first time in paperback, Lonesome Hero is a comic classic,
the award-winning smartass novel that launched a spectacular writing
career.
This new revised edition restores scenes deleted
from the original edition — the ‘director’s cut.’
It also features an introduction by the inimitable Mark Anthony
Jarman and an afterword by the author, who reflects how glad he
is, looking back at his first novel, that Lonesome Hero still manages
to embody the ironies of the era, “the fact that we often understood
perfectly how cartoonish we were. The early '70s was about avoiding
work at all costs and trying to live amusingly during all one’s
waking hours: about how weirdly far we would go to accomplish that.”
This book is printed on
ancient
forest-friendly paper.
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